BEING AN INSPECTOR
Inspecting level crossings is just a small part of an ORR inspector’s duties. Wake has covered plenty of areas on the railway in his time as an inspector:
“I used to head up the team that deals with Transport for London - I did that for five years. They have a completely different set of challenges to NR because they run an integrated railway on the Underground. It’s a very different beast, with very different issues.” Did you prefer it to working with NR? “I liked the fact that it was just me and my team dealing with LU. Now I’m in a larger framework of area teams that all feed into NR. In many ways, LU was easier to influence. being a smaller organisation. NR is a bit of a leviathan.
“Having said that, there are different challenges that I quite like on NR, like the track maintenance side of things - getting into the nitty-gritty of engineering keeps me on my toes. Working out how to inspect track management, for example. You have to think about what your criteria would be for what good track management looks like. Do you have the right policy and the right management leadership in place? Do you have the correct standards? If you don’t know what your criteria to assess look like, there’s no point asking the question in the first place. If I didn’t know what a good crossing looked like, why would I be inspecting it?”
But Wake explains that this is not just about looking at a set of rules and deciding whether what you are inspecting is following them. Not everything is black and white, and there are always softer issues to take into account, like culture within Network Rail, and within local communities.
“It takes a certain type of person to be an inspector. You need the right mix of people skills and the ability to know your own mind. You need to be able to sit in a room full of people, all of whom disagree with you, and tell them that they are all, in your opinion, completely wrong.
“And you need the intellectual ability and fortitude to be able to say ‘no, this is my conclusion. You need to do more to comply with the law’. If you didn’t do that, then you wouldn’t be regulating. You’d be asking questions but then not taking them anywhere. There’s no point asking a question if it doesn’t result in a conclusion. You’re either looking to make a change or give confirmation that everything is OK.”